Month: June 2008

My friend and former Creativity professor (yes, that was a class for my advertising degree) Assaf Avni just joined Twitter [@assafavni]. I’m excited to be able to keep up with what he’s up to. So he will get the best out of Twitter, I wrote a him a list of things to do/watchout for. … here’s the list perhaps it will be helpful to yall too.

twit messes up quite a bit. doesnt post, late post, no sms, no tracking, etc

when you setup your mobile device, whether you follow anyone to your phone or not, you want to send “track assafavni” to twitter (40404). doing this will send you SMS notifications anytime someone says your name who you are not following, very handy, must do this (but beware sometimes when twitter is overloard it doesnt work and you will still miss messages)

Summize is a great twitter search tool and you can use it to search for your username to see if anyone was talking to you that you missed

setup Twitterfeed to autopost to twitter anytime you post to your blog

Laura Beck and her team at Porter Novelli Austin have been helping launch some of the coolest startups on the plant for years; and they’re right here in Austin. Who knew! I didn’t until I met Brittany, Lauren, and Josh at the DEMOparty last month.

OneSpot, Radar Networks/Twine, PeoplePad, Friendfeed, those are some of their clients I can think off the top of my head. I know there are several in town.

After talking with Josh Dilworth a bit about the Startup District and Conjunctured he invited me to come chat with the whole office. It was great, they had ordered a ton of tacos that morning, everyone was giving me hi-fives and hugs and talking about startups, I was like what is this place!?! … the meeting went great, they are very very supportive – Josh especially has been helping me out a ton and I’m very grateful (thanks for sure dood).

Later that day I ran into two people who were talking about Porter Novelli and that’s when I decided, “geez, I’m gonna do a quick post on them.” 🙂

I can tell you, because they let me sit in on their Thursday Staff Meeting an hear the nuts and bolts, this is a talented, fun, excited, and clever team. I actually found myself thinking “wow, it would be fun to work here” and I never ever think that. Let me know if you fit the above and I’ll intro ya. cheers!

Quick note about the Cyc Foundation. From their website, this what what they do:

The Cyc Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the enrichment and utilization of the open source portions of the Cyc knowledge baseâ€”the worldâ€™s largest repository of machine-readable, common-sense knowledge. In this role, we will work with others to expand these resources, educate developers and increase general awareness of the potential applications of the technology.

How much do you know about the Semantic Web : How much do you contribute to the web.

Full house. Looks like Troy is doing a double take of something.

Juan and JohnDeo open up the event.

Troy Williams, founder of PeoplePad and formerly Questia talked about what the semantic web is to him, how he sees it, how it will be useful, etc. Was a great opener as the night slowly got more technical. (i know, i know. there is porn on the wall. i didnt pick the room. it’s some back room at a big bar.)

FACEBOOK, I’m sick of the singles ads and I’m sick of you owning my timeline.Â I love and appreciate everything that facebook let’s us do. I love being able to stay connected to my friends. I love being able to push content I think is important. I just hate that I’ll prob never be able to get any of this out.

Why would I create a photo album (an album of my life) if you’re never gonna let me hold it.

In case you’re not instantly grokking what I’m talking about. Let’s think about this. (and this is nothing new that people havn’t been saying for a lone time now) … all the actions you take on facebook – changes to your profile, friends you connect with, messages you send, people you break up with, all those little “stories,” as FB calls them, etc. those are reflections of your life. Shouldn’t YOU own the album?

When facebook first started, you know back years ago when I was in college, I would always think: you know, facebook should record all these changes we are making to our profiles and all the friends we are making and all the pictures we are uploading and let us print it all out in a book. back then FB was only for college students, and I was expecting to drop it when I graduated, I thought, “this would be killer as a yearbook because gawd knows I’m not gonna by a real year book that includes 20,000 people I dont know.” i even sent zuck a message about this. (if facebook had a way to search my sent messages I’d go find it, but I dont feel like pressing the next button that many times.) i still think this would be a cool idea. print it out. but no worries, i have more.

ok, here’s another reason why we should stop letting facebook own all our action, specifically our social ones:

sooner or later we are going to have, as Jonas Lamis of Scivestor has talked about, something like Google Agent. It’s going to better understand what we want done because it will know a ton about us. For instance, and this only scratches the surface (and I’m totally stealing this example), if my anniversary was coming the Agent would know and it would know who my girlfriend was and where I like to take her and what my schedule was like, etc, etc. I would just click and it would take care of all that for me – and perhaps offer a couple choices. The point is. This crazy Agent bot thing has to get to know me and that takes time and data. Right now the place that knows the most about me and has the most data is most definitely facebook and google and I would bet it’s the same for you. I dont want the Agent/bot thing to have to get the data from fb/google, I want it to get it from me.

Now, I’m not worried about facebook having all this information. kdfakhfph./ well, shit. i kind of am… … it’s just that there is no where else to go with it. i’m not going to be one of those people who doesn’t use facebook because all this, i dont want to miss out on all the fun and all the great things facebook lets me do, i just want an alternative or i want facebook to openup all this data. AND I WANT IT NOW.

We need to get people to understand how important it is that they own their identity online. Right now most people (ahem, besides leet ones who use nearlyfreespeach) goto Godaddy because they saw a lame super bowl ad. Have you seen Godaddy.com? Have you registered a domain from there? The site and domain control interfaces suck. For regular people to start doing anything with domains, which is what they need to start owning their identity, there has to be a better registar. One that is simple and doesn’t talk about DNS and or blah or blah. Just make it simple.

After seeing Gary Vaynerchuck last week Dane and I decided we were going to started video blogging… I haven’t started yet, but I have been watching Dane’s. His first post asks people what they are passionate about. I started writing a long comment and decided I’d just post it here and link to Dane. Here goes.

Passion

I love the language of enthusiasm. I live for it. For excitement. That’s really what attracts me to technology startups and the people involved in them.

Mission #1: Mercilessly beating and outsmarting life; forcing it to bend into the reality I choose.

How I’m doing this:

I’m constantly on the hunt for people with gusto. When I find them, we stick together.

I compete with these people each day to see who’s created the most value or done something ridiculous.

I absolutly love seeing Gary and listening to him talk. Wine is slightly interesting to me because it is a big part of the Sicilian side of my family, specifically with my grandpa :). Gary is uber connected with the tech scene so he always has good insight and predictions there, which is interesting. But what I love the most about this guy is his excitement for life. He’s an inspiration to anyone who wants to be themselves and make it. He was talking about how much he loves being able to be behind the table and chat with everyone. How that makes him feel like a cat. A cat being pet and raising his butt. hhah It was like we were all just petting him.

It’s all about breaking down the situation. Eliminating the barriers between the guy behind the table and your audience. Gary did this by talking about the situation. Discussing what was going on. How it felt to him and how it must feel to us. To me, you know someone understands and can control their context when they are able to make jokes about it. Jokes that everyone gets because they have all bought in to the environment. I think everybody loves when people can do that – same feeling I get when people make puns. Very clever, very aware. end rant(rave).

I took some video with my phone from the event, but once I got it on my computer and looked at it in comparison to Dane’s I scraped it. SO, here is

Some of the hippest peeps on the net have been playing with Seesmic recently. Yesterday Gary Vaynerchuck tweeted that him and kevinrose where on there chatting it up. So, I hopped over and asked a couple questions.

(oh yeah. facial hair. … like I said in my first video up there – boulder, techstars, gwen bell, andrew hyde… kickin some ass. I’ve been to Boulder once (in CO I always go to Telluride with fam) but I’m wanna come see yall soon. …totally agree on the valley talk. …I also know! Austin is a kick ass city and I’m trying to develop this sucker – that’s why we got Startup District rollin. Since southby I gave myself 1 year to see what we could turn this place into, and it’s coming along nicely.)

Gray is a mofo that knows how to love his fans and customers. I love how it just flows outta the guy — every time he’s talking it’s just like “Thank you sooo much for your question”, “Awesome t shirt”, “I love your burp”, whatever.. he makes ya feel good. Everyone can take a lesson. Kevin was kick ass at this too. Just more to the point – “what your question? BAM I’m gonna tell you the answer; and it’s a good one.”